


Touch Up

by kuro49



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Drive suit scars, Gen, Mark I Glory Days, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 13:21:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2271261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuro49/pseuds/kuro49
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Herc might not remember which magazine the shoot was done for, but he does remember the pictures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touch Up

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Airbrushed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2250438) by [Raine_Wynd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raine_Wynd/pseuds/Raine_Wynd). 



> Because Raine_Wynd mentioned Herc Hansen and drift scars and tattoos and I’m pretty much a fruitfly on a case of bananas when it comes to that. I would suggest reading her fic before this one, it might just make more sense.

Trauma being cut into pounds of flesh, lines and lines and lines being written across one half of the human body. Drive suit scars is burning in a Jaeger for hours, it is nerve impulses overfiring the circuitry suit lying as a second skin to the pilots’ own.

What the world cannot begin to understand is that drift compatibility is not a beautiful thing. That it is not at all the same as what’s being printed in those glossy rags because there are odds and then there’s choice.

Neither drift compatibility nor drive suit scars are the latter.

 

“Let’s play spot the difference, Herc.”

Scott’s lying on his bunk, boots hanging off of the edge, and Herc unceremoniously drops his dirty towel on him when he walks by to get a change of clothes. Scott doesn’t seem bothered by the stink of sweat, just rolls the towel into a ball and tosses it into the laundry hamper across their shared quarters easily. And then he continues without batting an eye as he waves a magazine at his brother.

“See something missing?”

It doesn’t register, not at first glance when Herc finally humours Scott if just to get him to stop. But when it does, it settles as something that coils uncomfortably tight in his gut.

“…You’ve got to be fuckin’ kidding me.”

But the cross page spread of Lucky Seven’s pilots tells a different thing.

“Wished I was, bro.”

 

Herc might not remember which magazine the shoot was done for, but he does remember the pictures, Scott and him standing too close, just as the rest of the world imagines them, wearing nothing but matching pairs of designer jeans.

The fact that they wear different sizes never seem to factor in. It is always about the mirror images they can make when they are standing next to one another.

What Herc remembers of his drive suit scars is not the picture he makes but the brand of every fight. The scars are taking the brunt of a Category I just below where his ribs are, the burn as he strains to keep a Category II from tearing a hole through Lucky’s chest and another from ripping the arm off from Scott’s side.

It is ointment and gauze over those lines, ugly and red and looking angrier than he’s been all his life. It is also the hiss that escapes from between his teeth when he is in the Kwoon after a fight, burning off the post-kill adrenaline with no regards that it looks as though someone’s taken a blunt knife to his skin.

 

“This is not like you at all, and I’d just like you to know that I fuckin’ love this.”

The two of them are already stripped down to a pair of PPDC-issued sweatpants, the tattoos on both of his and Scott’s arms on full display. They stand as they did in the photoshoot, mirror images of one another and not hiding a damn thing.

“Scotty, if you’re not going to stop it with the commentary—”

He is cut off when Scott decides to take the picture, the flash brighter than he anticipated.

 

Back in the heydays of the war though, back when Jaeger pilots are the kind of rock stars soldiers have no need being, drift scars are a different thing than they are now.

Back in those glory days, the media wouldn’t dream of airbrushing drive suit scars out of their pictures. They like that distinction with his on his left and Scott’s on his right. They don’t hide the drift scars, they never do. Hell, they would even increase the contrast, make the scars more prominent than they really are. Like any of the pilots can forget how each and every one of those lines came to be. And that’s a different kind of offensive.

His tattoos though, that’s a whole different thing.

 

If the brass and the PR team knew beforehand, the picture would have never been posted.

But Scott’s got a way with getting away with things like these, every since he was young, and the Internet doesn’t work the way a lot of people wished it did. Even without a caption to go with the photograph, the accusation it directs towards the magazine is blatantly clear. They are not in the wrong but there’s probably a better way to go about it.

The two of them get an earful from Sydney’s Marshal but at least the one with Scott’s middle finger raised at the camera never made it online, the letter C now a permanent fixture at the base of his middle finger when he tattooed each letter of Lucky Seven on his knuckles.

They never get an official apology from the magazine but that has never been what they are looking for.

Herc’s just content with the fact that it is the picture taken in the bathroom of their shared quarters that will remain and not the glossy spread of them not looking at all like themselves.

 

His first ink is of the RAAF, done at eighteen.

By the time he is made Ranger-ready, he is covered on both biceps, one adding on to another, red stars outlined in black on the underside of his arms, Lucky’s wings about to be the next in his collection across his shoulder blades.

Drive suit scars are not a choice.

Tattoos are.

And Hercules Hansen is damn sick of being fitted into situations where he has no control, where the choice is between his son and his wife, where the choice is always going to be his son.

When the pictures of Mako and Raleigh turn up with their drive suit scars airbrushed, Herc’s shocked in ways he really shouldn’t be. Herc’s drift compatibility is written on his skin, not all of it in its entirety but there’s enough of it here to matter. His sentiments are not the same as Mako’s or Raleigh’s but he is still a Jaeger pilot with the scars to match.

He understands what he is being asked. Drift compatibility is not a beautiful thing, but neither is it something to be watered down, and airbrushed out of existence.

Here’s what the world cannot begin to understand, there are just some things that are sacred, some things that no one has the right to change. The drive suit scars a pilot carries on their body, shared only by their co-pilot?

That’s most definitely one of them.

 

XXX Kuro

**Author's Note:**

> The imagery of Scott Hansen's knuckle tattoos are as seen in [this art by the talented historyemily](http://historyemily.tumblr.com/post/77807099208).
> 
> Also, the magazine spread might possibly look quite like [this](http://instagram.com/p/ttFlvwOwop/).


End file.
